8
Reduce Drama Through Precise and Persuasive Communication
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
– George Bernard Shaw
Learning to communicate effectively and persuasively, and teaching your employees to do the same, is essential to reach the top of the Healthy Workplace Culture Pyramid. Issues related to poor communication at work involve both one-on-one conversations and corporate communication. A breakdown in either arena could be fatal in your attempts to keep drama away from your organization.
The Most Common Communication Failures That Lead to Drama
A breakdown in communication which leads to workplace drama tends to fall into one of two categories:
- Saying nothing, usually for fear of saying the wrong thing.
- Saying the wrong thing.
There are countless examples in both categories, but I’ll focus on the ones that I’ve found to cause the most drama at work.
- Employees let emotions get the best of them, causing drama and making it more difficult to stop the drama once it starts.
- Often this means viewing issues only through a narrow personal lens, never considering the other person’s point of view.
- When emotions are high, logic often fails us. We forget our end goal and instead focus on being right. Our communication sometimes spirals into personal attacks, which increases the temperature of the situation.
- Many of us aren’t taught skills of persuasion. Without those skills, we often behave in ways that hurt more than help, which leads to unnecessary conflict.
- We fail to adapt our communication styles to make it more likely that we are heard.
- We communicate imprecisely. Words are extremely powerful and a lack of clarity leads to confusion, assumptions, and, of course, drama.
- In the workplace context, one way that these deficiencies culminate is through the improper use of legally charged terms, or personal allegations that someone is an “ist”—a racist, sexist, ageist, and so on. This problem stems from our failure to teach a language that isn’t rooted in legal terminology. We become trapped in the vicious cycle of: She complained about harassment so now I have to put my compliance hat on . . . she’s putting her compliance hat on so I better start protecting myself . . . there she goes protecting herself, which means she’s out to get us . . . she thinks I’m out to get the company so . . .”
I’ve seen every one of these issues play out in the workplace and each time I realize that teaching people to communicate more clearly, more precisely, and more persuasively would have a tremendous ROI in terms of reducing the cost—monetary and otherwise—of workplace drama.
Improve Your Emotional Intelligence to Communicate More Precisely
Chances are, if you’re reading this book you’ve heard about and maybe even studied the importance of emotional intelligence (also referred to as EQ which is short for an individual’s emotional quotient). But just in case you need a refresher, EQ is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.
In their book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, authors Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves identify four emotional intelligence skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.
- Personal competence: Your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies. Here, the focus is on you, rather than on interactions with others. This includes:
- Social competence: Your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior, and motives in order to improve the quality of your relationships. The focus here is on how you are with other people. This includes:
- Your social awareness, which is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them. This often means perceiving what other people are thinking and feeling, even if you don’t feel the same way. Two of the most important elements of social awareness are listening and observing.3
- Your relationship management, which is your ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to successfully manage interactions.4
So does our emotional intelligence really play a significant role in our ability to communicate effectively and persuasively? Are we really less likely to experience workplace drama if we sharpen our emotional intelligence skills? Absolutely. I’ve seen story after investigation story that centers around people accused of creating drama because of their lack of emotional intelligence. Here are a few.
Stories from the Trenches
The Socially Unaware Dude
His name was Jim. He managed the warehouse for a large company. Everyone knew Jim was old school. He made it clear that he didn’t understand the company’s obsession with diversity.
Because his position required it, he sat on the supplier diversity planning committee. Jim made it known that he thought the committee’s mission—to create and implement strategies to increase the number of qualified woman- and minority-owned service suppliers—was garbage. He’d take every opportunity to be un-PC at meetings. No one phrase was egregious on its own, but put together his comments were enough to create a strong and reasonable impression that he wasn’t fond of working with people who weren’t like him. Eventually (and inevitably), a woman with biracial children filed a complaint saying Jim was keeping her from a sought-after promotion.
The evidence supported her claim that Jim was impolite and clearly had no filter, but it did not support her claim that his behavior affected any promotion decision (in fact, he wasn’t even in a position to have a direct impact on her work).
Regardless, it was clear that Jim was lacking two critical skills, and this deficiency created an understandable perception that Jim was biased. First, he was almost completely lacking in social awareness. He was what I call a bad workplace meteorologist, unable to read the temperature and adjust his words and conduct accordingly. Jim was also lacking strong empathy skills and therefore was not very self-aware. He was unable to understand why his comments created a perception that his “antidiversity” stance would make diverse employees uncomfortable (other supporters of diversity were equally dismayed by Jim’s actions). He was unable to see it from their point of view and thought they were being overly sensitive.
The Cheating Salesman
The complaint actually came from the subordinate’s husband. “My wife’s boss, the VP of sales, is sexually harassing her. I’ve seen the texts he sends her and they’re inappropriate. She’s too scared to complain so I’m doing it for her.” The unfortunate spoiler alert is that while it was true the boss was sending the texts (and emails, and IMs, and videos), this was, sadly for the husband, very much a consensual affair (I won’t go into the gory details but suffice it to say, the evidence to prove this was overwhelming).
Although no employee had complained, the company was now aware of a serious allegation so they asked me to investigate.
The VP was one of the most hostile people I’ve ever interviewed for an investigation. He spent part of the interview trying to convince me that there should be no investigation since no one from within the company complained. He then switched gears to give me a series of farfetched explanations to “prove” to me that there was no affair (for the record, I found out a few months later that the VP and the employee left their spouses to be with each other). He spent the rest of the time trying to convince me that there was nothing suspicious about the subordinate receiving the department’s highest raises and bonuses. He was evasive and dismissive, not remembering that as the decision-maker, my judgment would have an impact on his job. Also, for the record, his unacceptable behavior did not affect my independence—I based my conclusions on the evidence.
Despite the fact that he was an extremely valuable member of the executive sales team, his company fired the VP. They based their decision only partially on the fact that he’d exhibited poor judgment by having an affair with his subordinate (though that would certainly warrant termination, given the evidence I found). Instead, the company’s decision was primarily driven by the fact that he’d been combative and dishonest during the investigation process (not just with me).
This VP forgot that his goal should have been to keep his job and to do his part to repair the loss of trust that resulted from his behavior. Instead, he wanted to be right. This is a person whom I would guess would score quite low in the self-management category of an EQ test.
The Lovable but Tone-Deaf Nurse
Laura had all the characteristics of a great critical care nurse. She was compassionate and kind, especially when it came to patient care. She was also known by her coworkers as a fun-loving person who was always ready to praise, congratulate, and celebrate.
Nina was an administrative assistant in the department. She had been very open about her religious beliefs and explained to everyone that she strictly adhered to the teachings of her faith, including the fact that her religion prohibited her from celebrating birthdays or other celebrations.
Laura, who was of a different faith, thought celebrating birthdays was a must. She told Nina her beliefs were silly and that no harm could come from celebrating birthdays—especially your own. Nina stayed away from all other office celebrations but when her birthday rolled around, Laura came to Nina’s desk with a cake and balloons. She sang “Happy Birthday” to Nina and when Nina began to object, Laura told her not to be such a stick in the mud and to stop stressing about getting older. Laura told Nina she should enjoy and appreciate the gesture. Nina was dismayed and coworkers who were watching said it was as if it was happening in slow motion. They were horrified by what they saw and heard. The rest of the team could see that Laura’s social awareness and social management skills needed some sharpening, but this was lost on Laura.
Each of the characters in these real-life investigations could have kept drama away (and could have kept their jobs) if they had honed their emotional intelligence skills. Sure, some of the characters inspire more sympathy than others, but these are three typical stories of the type of workplace drama that unfolds every day because of a failure to manage individual emotions and an inability to look around to gauge how others react.
Using Emotional Intelligence to Keep Drama Away
If the failure to use emotional intelligence in communication is such a common precursor to workplace drama, what strategies can companies implement to help employees communicate clearly and transparently?
Some suggestions follow.
You Are What You Say, So Be Meticulous with Your Words
Words matter, so be impeccable with your word. This is the first of the Four Agreements proposed by Don Miguel Ruiz. Ruiz’s theories are rooted in Toltec wisdom. That sounds mysterious and otherworldly, but the truth is that his simple advice to be impeccable with our language really is about emotional intelligence.5
For example, calling diversity efforts stupid creates a reasonable and expected belief that you are antidiversity. If that’s the image Jim wants to have, then he’s done a good job being impeccable with his choice of words. But here’s the rub: If that’s what Jim believes, then he must face the reasonable and expected consequences of his choice to say these things.
If, on the other hand, Jim seeks to be viewed as someone whose opinions do not affect his decision-making at work, then he must be more precise and less emotional when he speaks about these topics. In fact, in real life, Jim was shocked to hear that people viewed him as antidiversity or biased in any way. Jim might have benefited from learning to look at his behavior from another person’s point of view. Instead, his choice to let his emotions dictate made him someone that few wanted to work with.
Does this mean that the Jims of the world—those who think we’ve gone too far with being “PC”—have to stifle their opinions? No, but they do have to accept the fact that their words are very likely to cause drama. And when an organization has a Jim in its midst, it has to decide whether failing to take steps to avoid and resolve drama is in line with its culture. If Jim’s words and actions fall short of your commitment to create a culture of respect and inclusion, then this type of behavior must be deemed unacceptable.
Pivot from Defensiveness to Genuine Curiosity: Being Right Isn’t Always Right
You can’t sow confrontation and expect to harvest peace. That’s not how things work in life, and it certainly isn’t how they work at work.
In the case of the cheating VP, his ego—his need to be right—was his Achilles heel. I don’t know what his organization would have done if he’d simply admitted that he used extremely poor judgment and asked for a second chance. But instead, he dug in.
I certainly understood his reluctance to admit to an extramarital affair since doing so would have dire consequences at work and at home. The problem was that the evidence was overwhelming; he and the subordinate were clearly having an intimate affair. And worse, this otherwise highly intelligent man behaved illogically by focusing on meaningless minutiae like, “Well, since no one from inside the company is complaining, then there should be no investigation.”
The one and only issue that made him listen was when I asked him if he could imagine that because people believed they were having an affair, others on his team would think they were at a distinct disadvantage when it came time to evaluate performance and give raises. He was willing to briefly see things from the perspective of his other employees and understood that his behavior eroded trust and created a strong sense of unfairness. Unfortunately, this brief glimpse of emotional intelligence quickly vanished and he pivoted back to defensiveness and wanting to prove me wrong.
If you have employees or leaders at your organization who get trapped by their own fixation to be right and react defensively, perhaps providing lessons in improving empathy skills, as well as relationship management skills will help you salvage that person’s career at your company before they cause irreparable drama. Doing this will also help your company plant seeds of ethical decision-making and integrity, and that will most certainly reap a worthwhile harvest.
Use Helpful Communication Tools
Provide employees with tangible and easy-to-use tools to strip communication of personal attacks or needless emotion. This doesn’t mean you create a robotic workplace, but it does mean that you give employees options to communicate in more precise ways.
Emtrain uses the Workplace Color Spectrum®6 for this purpose (see Figure 8.1). This simple communication tool categorizes behavior by color, ranging from green, for respectful and positive behavior, to red, for illegal and toxic conduct. This tool serves numerous purposes. The first is that it creates an easy and safe way to call out objectionable behavior. And it does so in a way that makes it about the conduct and not about the person. So, “Laura, your insistence that I celebrate birthdays is annoying and discriminatory, you’re being a real jerk,” becomes, “Laura, I know you like celebrating birthdays, but I’ve told you I don’t and I can’t. Your behavior is orange at best and bordering on red. Please stop.”
Figure 8.1 Emtrain’s Workplace Color Spectrum
This example also shows the tool’s second purpose. As I’ve stated numerous times throughout this book, a huge driver of workplace drama is relying exclusively on legal language to express dissatisfaction. Too often, employees use “harassment,” “discrimination,” and “retaliation” inaccurately and end up escalating the drama by doing so. This tool provides employees an option to speak to each other in English instead of in legal-speak.
The other way employees use this tool is to increase empathy and understanding. Emtrain has found that in using the tool, employees sometimes differ in how they rate certain words or behavior. Sometimes women rate a situation as orange while men see it as green or yellow. Sometimes subordinate employees see the actions of a supervisor as orange while the supervisor herself thinks she’s being respectful and therefore green. As a result of seeing that we all view behavior through our own lenses, we’re able to help others understand our point of view.
Since the tool gives words to prompt further discussion (words like positive, demotivating, alienating), the tool is most effective when used as a starting point for a longer, honest and respectful discussion about workplace conduct. This decreases needless emotional reactions and increases understanding. Together, this translates into a steep decline in workplace drama.
Seek to Be Understood: Not Everyone Will Agree with You, and That’s Okay
Do your part to fix drama quickly when you can, but your goal should be to clearly and precisely state your point, knowing that people might disagree. Don’t let this reality kill your spirit or your commitment to continue to communicate in a respectful and clear way with all your colleagues.
Of course, this advice is easier to give than it is to follow. But it is possible and the reward—decreased drama at work—is well worth the effort.
Let’s go back to Ruiz’s Four Agreements to explore this concept further. Ruiz’s second agreement is “Don’t take anything personally,” and the third agreement is “Don’t make assumptions.”
Providing further context to “Don’t take things personally,” Ruiz says: “Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality.” Explaining “Don’t make assumptions,” Ruiz advises: “Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama.”7
Helping your employees understand that people often say or do things because of their own reality, not to purposely hurt or anger the listener, helps lessen the sting.
For example, when the VP expressed his anger in my direction, it would have been easy for me to take it personally and lash out with my own anger. But that wouldn’t have helped me get to the bottom of the issue. I understood that his anger, directed at me at that moment, was really a projection of his fear and frustration. After all, he’d just been caught red-handed doing something he knew was wrong. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, but looking at it from the “this isn’t personal” lens allowed me to step back and focus on doing my work, rather than focus on getting angry right back. And clearing my mind of any assumption or judgment allowed me to focus on being objective. After all, I wasn’t there to pass judgment on an affair, I was there to gather information about whether his behavior had a negative impact on the workplace.
Teach your employees these concepts so that they can erase the emotional blinders that come from taking things personally or making assumptions. You’ll see an immediate improvement in communication and understanding. Doing this will go a long way toward achieving your goal of creating a respectful workplace where drama is a thing of the past
.. . .
Consider supplementing any current training you offer with training on how to increase emotional intelligence so that your employees are well-versed on using these types of techniques to increase empathy, cooperation, and collaboration. It’s not a magic pill, but understanding your own emotions and improving your ability to understand others are critical skills to help reduce workplace drama.
The Cassandra Curse: How Not to Be Persuasive
Although there are varying details to the legend of Cassandra, in a nutshell it goes like this:
God Apollo fell in love with Cassandra and granted her the gift of prophecy. When Cassandra denied Apollo’s advances, he placed a curse on her, so that no one would believe her words or her predictions.8
In short, Cassandra’s gift – the power of prophesy – was completely eliminated by her curse – the inability to persuade anyone to believe her visions and act accordingly. So while Cassandra was always at least one step ahead of everyone around her, this gift of prophesy didn’t help her since people did not heed her warnings. Drama.
There are three primary reasons why people ignored Cassandra’s cautionary pleas:
- Cassandra spoke in oblique riddles, making her message unclear at best and impossible to understand at worst.
- Cassandra wasn’t in a position to be taken seriously. Her lack of power and voice diminished her ability to be heard and her warnings were therefore disregarded.
- She asked for too much. Too often, she wanted those around her to see the future as she saw it, rather than meeting them where they were so that she could provide solutions that were doable. This part of the curse also meant that she was asking others to completely dismiss their own beliefs and embrace hers instead.9
You’re probably thinking, Greek mythology . . . what does that have to do with the workplace and with achieving a drama-free environment? It’s all about being persuasive. Without the ability to communicate precisely and persuasively—at the individual and organizational level—getting to the top of the Healthy Workplace Culture Pyramid is impossible.
The Cassandra Curse: Workplace Edition
The Case of the Oblique Messenger
Nigel supervises employees in the menswear department of a famous design company. Andi and Emily are designers on Nigel’s team and while Nigel is mostly pleased with Emily’s work, he is not happy with Andi’s. He’s noticed that, in addition to presenting tired ideas for next year’s fashion line, Andi has less enthusiasm for the job and pays less attention to details—two characteristics he views as nonnegotiable for designers on his team. Nigel heard rumors that Andi and her husband recently bought a coffee shop and he believes that Andi might be spending time on that endeavor with the ultimate goal of leaving the company and dedicating herself to being a full-time small business owner.
Unfortunately, rather than sitting down with Andi and speaking with her candidly and clearly about his concerns, he gave her cryptic messages—a mistake made by too many managers. Sometimes he attempted humor—“Okay, Andi, these designs aren’t going to create themselves.” Other times he was even more passive aggressive—“it must be nice to be able to roll into the office at 9:30 every day.” The one thing he didn’t do was talk to her to express his concerns and to try to find a solution.
Over time, Andi interpreted Nigel’s comments as sexist since she felt they were only directed toward her. Although this claim was hard to prove for several reasons, not the least of which was that Nigel did not make similar comments to Andi’s female coworkers, Nigel’s oblique messages created a reasonable and expected perception in Andi’s mind and this failure resulted in unnecessary drama.
The Case of the Wrong Messenger
Ruth was a successful attorney who was generally liked by her colleagues, but she rubbed a few people the wrong way. Some disliked her for legitimate reasons, while others viewed her negatively out of pettiness and mean-spiritedness. Unfortunately, Ruth didn’t do herself any favors by giving those who disliked her, including numerous top leaders, more reasons to think of her as pushy and overly aggressive (we’ll set aside for now whether a male attorney with her personality characteristics would have been similarly regarded). She also lost support and sympathy when, in her frustration, she began to complain about everything that didn’t go her way.
Eventually, Ruth complained about something very legitimate—a fellow attorney who was a master at creating workplace drama. Others agreed to support Ruth and even signed their name to her complaint. Unfortunately, since Ruth was viewed as “the ring leader” and had a long-standing reputation with leadership as “a complainer,” her statements fell on deaf ears.
It eventually became clear that Ruth’s complaints were spot-on, but it was too late. Ruth’s predictions about the drama king came true; not only was he emboldened to continue his bad behavior, but it actually got worse. The company ignored her complaints because they viewed her as the wrong messenger. And while this had a negative effect on Ruth, it had an even more devastating and long-lasting effect on the company. The increased drama caused others, including many women, to leave the company. The company also saw a steep decline in the morale and productivity of the employees who opted to stay.
The Case of the Impractical Corporate Message
In their quest to improve their workplace culture, a large organization implemented two big ideas: (1) it would try to keep up with tech company perks that many of their employees talked about—free food, a pool table, and more organized social events—and (2) they introduced an app-based “suggestion box,” through which employees were encouraged to provide ideas, no matter how zany.
Unfortunately, what started out as a plan to increase employee engagement and loyalty ended up having the opposite effect.
First, the company didn’t take into account the foundation of the Healthy Workplace Culture Pyramid. At a minimum, employees must feel fairly compensated before a company can make its way up the pyramid. In this case, employees universally hated each new perk since, in their eyes, “That money could and should have gone toward long overdue raises.” The company was asking too much of the employees—to ignore the obvious pain point of feeling underpaid and instead focus on how much fun it would be to play pool with their colleagues.
Second, the company expected too much of the employees with their free-for-all suggestion box. They received hundreds of comments, many complaints and a good percentage of pie-in-the-sky ideas that could never work. As a result, none of the ideas came to fruition. The employees, especially those who submitted suggestions, were upset. And the finance department, who saw this as a waste of money, was equally upset.
By failing to meet the employees where they were—starting with salary reviews and giving more guidance on the type of suggestions that were doable—this company’s great ideas turned into drama in the form of increased employee anger and frustration.
At the root of Cassandra’s suffering was her complete inability to persuade those around her to believe what she knew would be the truth, whether it was her failure to communicate clearly, her failure to understand that she wasn’t always the right messenger, or her failure to explain her prophesies in a way that could be accepted. Ultimately, her curse was that she was unable to communicate convincingly. Although Cassandra was doomed, there are a number of lessons based on her plight that you can leverage to make your workplace healthier.
Breaking the Curse: How to Be More Persuasive
Not all of us were gifted with the power of prophesy, but luckily neither were we cursed with the misfortune of always being ignored. It turns out that Cassandra’s three downfalls provide great lessons for the workplace and serve as a roadmap to help employees communicate more precisely and persuasively. Goodbye, drama.
Lesson 1. Become a Master Persuader by Using the “P2 Filter”
Run your conversations through the P2 filter to make your communication more precise and persuasive. That means using your best emotional intelligence skills and your persuasion skills to wordsmith messages to ensure that you say what you mean, and mean what you say.
In the case of Nigel and Andi, Nigel might have avoided workplace drama if he’d been more precise in his conversations with Andi, eliminating any ambiguity or confusion. Like most managers, Nigel found it difficult to deliver performance concerns. He let this fear, along with his own increasing frustration with Andi’s declining performance, dictate his actions. By using imprecise language, he made things worse.
What if he’d said this instead:
Andi, over the past few months I’ve noticed changes in your performance and in your level of enthusiasm about your work. I know it’s tough to hear feedback that’s less than stellar, but I want to assure you that my goal is to have an open and candid dialogue so we can work through this together.
By starting out in this way, Nigel is not only being transparent, he’s also stating the purpose of the conversation and his goal right away. Too many managers launch right into performance criticism, often putting the employee in a defensive mode. By stating his intention at the beginning, Andi knows that Nigel’s goal is to make things better.
He might have continued with:
The last batch of designs you gave me missed the mark. They actually looked a lot like last year’s designs. I know in the past you’ve done background research to study the latest trends, and even come up with trendsetting styles, but these designs didn’t have your signature creativity. Let’s talk about what’s going on so that I can be sure to provide you what you need to get back on track.
Here, Nigel has wordsmithed his message to do a few things:
- He was direct (he didn’t sugarcoat the fact that her work missed the mark).
- He praised her for past work, recognizing that she has the talent to do better.
- He made it clear that his goal was to do his part—he was willing to provide her the resources necessary to get back on track.
I call this being the compassionate sharpshooter: communicating in ways that are equal parts direct and caring.
Nigel could have continued with:
I’ve also noticed that you’re not as enthusiastic about your work lately. I completely understand that each of us has good days and bad days, but given the nature of our work, enthusiasm and passion are crucial. Do you agree?
Here, Nigel is again being a compassionate sharpshooter, but he’s doing one other thing: He’s seeking Andi’s buy-in and opening the door for Andi to talk about the reasons for her lowered level of excitement. Andi might have confirmed the rumors that she was planning to leave the company, in which case they might have negotiated a mutually beneficial exit plan. Or it might turn out that those rumors were false and Andi might have acknowledged her loss of interest in her job, which would give rise to a healthy discussion about next steps to help her improve.
One additional way to make conversations like these easier is to practice. If you’re in HR, offer this as a resource. Give your managers the opportunity to rehearse how they will give feedback. Ask the manager how he anticipates the employee will react and play the part of the employee. If the manager thinks the employee is going to get angry, sad, or defensive, then play that part and let the manager work through the kinks. And if you’re a manager working at a company that doesn’t already do this, encourage HR to offer this resource. This will allow managers to come up with the best language to give their message, and it also helps them anticipate what might get them off track. Doing this always results in performance evaluation meetings that are more focused and productive.
These are not easy conversations to have, but they are necessary if you want to reduce workplace drama. Nigel would have saved himself, Andi, and the company a lot of time, stress, and energy if he’d run his conversations through the P2 filter.
Lesson 2. Become a Master Persuader by Learning What Makes People Tick
Understanding what might motivate or persuade your audience is a key way to keep drama away.
In the case of Ruth, she mistakenly thought that the answer was to enlist support and to write a lengthy complaint letter, detailing every misstep the drama-producer had ever committed. But she’d become the workplace “girl who cried wolf” since she’d complained too often already (often about insignificant issues). She’d also lost credibility by rubbing people the wrong way. Fair or not, she should have known that a message, even one that was true, might be ignored if it came from her. To make matters worse, instead of focusing on the three or four examples of egregious behavior she and others suffered at the hands of the abusive colleague, she threw in every slight, every insult, every example of poor judgment. She watered down her message to the point of completely diminishing its value.
Help employees understand the power of knowing what motivates others to make them master persuaders. Don’t mistake this advice for being manipulative or dishonest. As I’ve said over and over, none of the advice I offer works if it’s implemented in a disingenuous or inauthentic way. But if your goal is truly to make yourself heard, then use the right language to make that more likely.
In Ruth’s case, if her goal was to alert the company to a real issue so the company leaders could take proper action, she should have done one of two things. She should have either taken herself out of the equation altogether, knowing that management would diminish the importance of the concerns if her name was associated with them, or she should have done a better job expressing her concerns by focusing on the three or four issues that mattered most, rather than writing a short novel detailing every mistake ever made. In other words, Ruth should have figured out what was most likely to motivate leadership to take the complaints seriously and to act.
Teaching employees to identify how they are motivated and how others are motivated will increase the chance that communication will become persuasive. Once people understand each other better, a drama-free workplace is just around the corner.
Lesson 3. Become a Master Persuader by Being Collaborative and Practical
When the company in the last example implemented their ideas, they forgot to first take the collective organizational pulse. If they’d done so, they could have easily predicted that taking these two steps would end in drama. With that information, they might have changed course and invested their time and money into areas that not only eliminated the possibility of drama, but would also have had the desired effect of increasing employee engagement.
For example, a quick review of the company’s employee surveys would have uncovered ample data showing extreme dissatisfaction with salary and raises (or the lack of raises). The comments in those surveys also would have eliminated the need to spend money on a suggestion box app since the concerns raised in the surveys needed to be resolved before moving into the more sophisticated arena of seeking employee input for more innovative ideas.
It was impractical to think the company could skip over basic steps to fix the employee engagement problems with these cosmetic fixes.
A final point is about pivoting. If your organization falters, learn from the setback and try again. Here, the company would have been best served by sending a company-wide email acknowledging their misstep and promising to do better.
. . .
Whether it’s individuals who miscommunicate or don’t communicate at all—or organizations that fail to deliver clear and understandable messages to their workforce—a failure to communicate precisely and persuasively will undermine your organization’s quest to achieve a drama-free workplace. Learn to be precise and persuasive, and teach others in your organization those skills, and you’ll see a dramatic reduction in workplace drama.